Too many students have crowded outside his closed office door and Sunil Gulati cannot concentrate through the noise.
The sign-up sheet for a Thursday lunch with the professor has quickly filled and the queue of 22 students clustered around his office door want to know if he’ll schedule another meal.
“Okay, okay,” he calms the crowd. “We’ll see what wecan do.”
Gulati has had a lot of practice of late trying to calm clamorous crowds angling for his attention.
Sunil Gulati was named president of the United States Soccer Federation in March 2006
Named president of the United States Soccer Federation in March 2006, he has been trying to translate his vision for the team into reality, while contending with pressure from colleagues, players and fans. And the road has been anything but smooth.
Just six months after Gulati’s accession, the US national soccer team made an appearance at the World Cup in Germany, highly ranked and under intense media scrutiny. But Gulati watched from the stands with great disappointment as the team suffered a quick defeat in the first round.
“I’m so upset!” one blogger lamented on worldcupblog.org. Another poster on fifaworldcup.com said, “This only proves and tells the world that they do not have a place in the highest level of football.”
It was a disconcerting start for Gulati. A few months later, the professor settles into his small office in the economics department at Columbia University, and shrugs off the loss with a philosophical, “What can you do?”
How a young man born in Allahabad 47 years ago, who never played professional football, ended up heading the US federation underscores a passion for the sport that Gulati has cultivated his whole life.
His family moved to a small Connecticut town from India when he was three years old and Gulati grew up playing soccer. He participated and coached youth leagues throughout his college years. As a Columbia graduate student, the sport was far from a national obsession, and so, the organization of the entire league was essentially managed off spreadsheets from his Apple Mac.
As the league grew, Gulati worked in almost every capacity, in accounting, managing, assisting, and coaching. Still, his parents were uncertain how this interest in soccer would affect his career path.
“They thought I was kind of spinning my wheels, doing this crazy sports thing,” Gulati recalls. But he was allowed the indulgence as he moved on to a “real” career: as an economics professor at Columbia and as an economic adviser at the World Bank. “I wasn’t a renegade. I always had a day job.”
A year ago, few on campus even knew that the professor, whose passion for teaching has earned him plenty of student fans, cared for soccer. Columbia’s online student newspaper, Bwog.com, regularly tracks his quippy one-liners in his economics class: “You’re supposed to do something for the people you love on Valentine’s Day. And, of course, I love you all very much. So I decided to give you the quiz on pink paperinstead!”